Speakers

Sasha Aickin has been working in the software industry in San Francisco for nearly 20 years. His most recent position was as the CTO of Redfin. He is currently a React core team member.

Sarah Allen is a technical lead and manager working on serverless infrastructure at Google. Previously, Sarah created early web platforms with Shockwave and Flash Media Server and led the mobile development company Blazing Cloud, developing many native mobile and web apps. She believes that software should be seriously fun and that there is magic in making powerful tools that spark imagination and challenge us all to keep learning and inventing.

Alex Banks is a software engineer for Moon Highway, Lynda.com author, and JavaScript enthusiast. He started writing code at the age of eight years old on his first computer, a Tandy TRS-80. In 1995, Alex developed his first website and has been hooked ever since. Alex now lives in Tahoe City, California, and he provides classroom and online-based training regularly for Yahoo, eBay, PayPal, Stanford University, and other companies across the country. When Alex isn’t in a classroom, he spends his time developing applications, learning new technologies, and writing custom training curriculums with Moon Highway. He is also the author of O’Reilly’s Learning React and Learning GraphQL.

Thomas Bouldin is the tech lead for Google events. Previously, he led the cloud functions for Firebase team, where he contributed to the Firebase real-time database and Firebase SDKs. Thomas has been developing serverless platforms since before the term was popularized. He was an early employee at Parse, where he built the company’s client and server-side push notifications infrastructure. He also worked on Google Image Search infrastructure and Microsoft Windows. Thomas holds a bachelor’s degree in software engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a focus on computer graphics and operating systems and security.

Samer Buna is a software engineer at jsComplete. A polyglot coder with years of practical experience in designing, implementing, and testing software—including web and mobile applications development, API design, functional programming, optimization, system administration, databases, and scalability—Samer has worked in industries ranging from real estate and government to education and publishing. Samer is passionate about everything JavaScript and loves exploring new libraries. He has authored several technical books and online courses about Node.js, React, GraphQL, and Ruby on Rails. Samer holds master’s degrees in management and information security.

Paul Calvano has been helping enterprises improve the performance of their web applications for more than 15 years. As a senior web performance architect at Akamai, he helps customers optimize their website and mobile performance by utilizing the Akamai platform efficiently, following industry best practices, and designing solutions to help overcome technical obstacles.

Elaine Chao is a product manager at Adobe Systems, currently working on Adobe XD. In her 12-year tenure at Adobe, she’s worked as an engineer on a variety of products geared toward designers and web producers, including Dreamweaver, Edge Animate, and Creative Cloud Extract. Elaine is also a martial arts instructor, musician, writer, volunteerism advocate, and an Adobe Founders Award winner. You can find her online tweeting and blogging on Medium as @elainecchao.

Lin Clark makes code cartoons. She’s also part of Mozilla’s Emerging Technologies Group, where she works with the WebAssembly and Rust teams. Her current project is making it easy to use WebAssembly with today’s JavaScript tools, including npm and bundlers. In previous lives, she worked at npm, was a core contributor to open source projects like Firefox’s developer tools, and contributed to HTML data standards.

Kate Compton is a generative artist, programmer, inventor, and PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is developing artificial intelligence to augment human creativity. She wrote the popular generative-text language Tracery and the bot-making language Bottery. Kate enjoys laser cutting, artbots, Twitter bots, and baking.

Kim Crayton is a business coach, a proud multipotentialite, and advocate for diversity, inclusion, and safe spaces in tech. Kim has years of experience working with learners of all ages, skill levels, and abilities and is now using her knowledge to develop technical people, ideas, organizations, and communities. She is known as a problem solver and strategy developer and possesses a unique ability to see the big picture while still managing the details. Whether in the role of strategist, educator, consultant, writer, public speaker, mentor, trainer, or curriculum designer, Kim is always in search of innovative approaches that enable individuals, organizations, and communities to intentionally and skillfully create environments that support the sharing of common attitudes, interests, and goals in order to build more innovative and profitable businesses while growing a more inclusive and diverse technology community. She is currently pursuing a PhD in business administration with a focus on technology entrepreneurship.

Cliff Crocker is a product line director at Akamai Technologies, where he spends his time building product strategy for performance analytics. Previously, he was vice president of product at SOASTA and engineering leader for the performance, reliability, and site analytics initiatives at @WalmartLabs. Cliff is an active contributor in the web performance community, evangelizing the importance of speed as it relates to user behavior and ultimately business ROI. In his spare time, he enjoys skiing in the mountains of Colorado, where he resides with his wife and two boys.

Scott Davis is a Web Architect and Developer Advocate with ThoughtWorks, where he focuses on the leading-edge, innovative, emerging, and nontraditional aspects of web development, such as serverless web apps, mobile web apps (responsive PWAs), HTML5-based smart TV apps, conversational UIs (like Siri and Alexa), and using web technologies to build IoT solutions. He is also the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a Denver-based training and software development consultancy. Scott has been writing about web development for over 10 years. His books include Getting Started with Grails, Groovy Recipes, GIS for Web Developers, The Google Maps API: Adding Where to Your Web Applications, and JBoss at Work. He is also the author of several popular article series at IBM developerWorks, including Mastering MEAN, Mastering Grails, and Practically Groovy. His videos include Architecture of the MEAN Stack, Responsive Mobile Architecture, and On the Road to Angular 2. Scott is also the cofounder of the Denver HTML5 User Group.

Hassan Djirdeh is a frontend developer for the app platform team within Shopify. An engineering graduate and a self-taught web developer, Hassan has worn a number of different hats over his career, including technology consultant within Deloitte Digital, where he helped clients build and scale their frontend applications.

Houssein Djirdeh is a software developer at Rangle.io building web and mobile applications with JavaScript. He is passionate about progressive enhancement and building for the mobile web. Houssein is also the author of the GitPoint open source project and has written books such as Modern AngularJS and Fullstack React Native with Fullstack.io. On the rare occasions he is not working on a blog post or his next side project, he enjoys giving talks to the community.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist, blogger, and technology activist. Cory is the coeditor of the popular blog Boing Boing and a contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wired, and many other newspapers, magazines, and websites. He was formerly director of European affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards, and treaties. Cory holds an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University (UK), where he is a visiting senior lecturer; in 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

Cory’s novels have been translated into dozens of languages and are published by Tor Books and simultaneously released on the internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their reuse and sharing, a move that increases his sales by enlisting his readers to help promote his work. He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and British Science Fiction Awards. His latest young adult novel is Pirate Cinema, a story of mashup guerrillas who declare war on the entertainment industry. His latest novel for adults is Rapture of the Nerds, written with Charles Stross and published in 2012. His New York Times best seller Little brother was published in 2008. Its sequel, Homeland, was published in 2013. His latest short story collection is With a Little Help, available in paperback, ebook, audiobook, and limited edition hardcover. In 2011, Tachyon Books published a collection of his essays, Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century (with an introduction by Tim O’Reilly), and IDW published a collection of comic books inspired by his short fiction called Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now. The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, a PM Press Outspoken Authors chapbook, was also published in 2011. His forthcoming books include Anda’s Game, a graphic novel from FirstSecond.

Cory cofounded the open source peer-to-peer software company Opencola, sold to OpenText in 2003, and presently serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, the Glenn Gould Foundation, and the Chabot Space & Science Center’s SpaceTime project. In 2007, Entertainment Weekly called him “the William Gibson of his generation.” He was also named one of Forbes magazine’s Web Celebrities every year from 2007 to 2010 and one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders for 2007. On February 3, 2008, Cory became a father. The little girl is called Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow and is a marvel that puts all the works of technology and artifice to shame.

Brian Douglas is a developer advocate at GitHub, where he mainly works on frontend technology. He got his start with web development with Rails. Brian is the host of the JAMstack Radio podcast and enjoys exploring new programming languages and sharing his findings.

Martine Dowden is an artist, educator, and consultant and is the UX development lead for both Andromeda and FlexePark. Focusing on web interfaces that are beautiful, functional, and usable, Martine delivers products that adhere to WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 for accessibility and compliance. She approaches user experience from both art and science, drawing from her degrees in psychology and visual communications.

Brendan Eich is the cofounder and CEO of Brave Software, which aims to transform the online ad ecosystem with faster and safer browsing as well as micropayments and better ads to give users and publishers a better deal. Previously, Brendan was CTO and CEO of the Mozilla Corporation and cofounded the Mozilla project and foundation. While at Mozilla, he helped launch the award-winning Firefox web browser. Brendan is also the inventor of JavaScript, the internet’s most widely used programming language.

Tammy Everts is chief experience officer at SpeedCurve, where she helps companies understand how visitors use their websites, and a cochair of O’Reilly Fluent. Tammy has spent the past two decades studying how people use the web. Since 2009, she’s focused on the intersection between web performance, user experience, and business metrics. Her book, Time Is Money: The Business Value of Web Performance, from O’Reilly, is a distillation of much of this research. She also cocurates (with Tim Kadlec) WPO Stats, a collection of performance case studies.

Yakov Fain is managing director at IT consultancy Farata Systems, where he develops web apps for various clients. Yakov is the coauthor of Angular 2 Development with TypeScript (1st and 2nd editions) and Enterprise Web Development. A Java Champion, he has taught multiple classes and workshops on web and Java-related technologies, presented at international conferences, and published more than a thousand blog posts.

Jeremy Fairbank is a web developer at Test Double, where he helps improve how the world builds software. Jeremy has many years of experience in frontend and full stack development and has presented numerous times on web development at conferences such as Fluent Conf and RailsConf. He is passionate about frontend development and its future, especially in functional JavaScript and Elm, and is the author of Programming Elm from the Pragmatic Programmers.

Sarah Federman is a UX designer and frontend engineer at Adobe, where she uses her diverse skillset to help create the company’s design system, dubbed Spectrum. Sarah loves applying systems thinking to solve product problems. Previously, she was a UI engineer at LinkedIn. Sarah holds a BFA in new media design from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Max Firtman is a mobile and web developer, trainer, speaker, and writer. Max teaches mobile HTML5 and performance trainings for top companies around the world. The founder of IT-training company ITMaster, Max is a well-known professional in the mobile web community. He blogs about mobile web platforms on Mobilexweb.com, keeps compatibility tables updated at Mobilehtml5.org, and has written many books, including Programming the Mobile Web (available in a second edition) and the recent High Performance Mobile Web, published by O’Reilly Media. He is a frequent speaker at conferences, including QCon, Mobilism, OSCON, Velocity, Fluent, Google Developer Day, JSConf, GOTO, AdobeCamp, and many other events around the world. Max has been widely recognized for his work in the mobile web community. He is an Adobe Community Professional, Microsoft IE User Agent, Nokia Developer Champion, and BlackBerry Elite, among other distinctions.

Stephen Fluin is a developer advocate on the Angular Team at Google, where he works to solve real-world problems faced by developers and businesses and represent the needs of the community within the Angular team.

Sebastian Golasch is a specialist senior manager software developer at Deutsche Telekom, where he works on the company’s smart home platform, Qivicon. After some time developing backend applications with Java, PHP, and Ruby, he became a citizen of the JavaScript world. Famous last words: “If I would’ve wanted to work in enterprise, I’d have joined Starfleet.”

Juliana Gomez is a Colombian-Canadian software engineer at Huge, where they use semantic HTML, CSS, JavaScript (ES6), jQuery, Bootstrap, and REST APIs to build websites and web apps. They believe the world would be a nicer place if the web was more accessible and if we all had access to communities that filled us with a sense of belonging.

Michael Gooding is a web performance evangelist for Akamai Technologies, where he helps customers identify performance bottlenecks and solves often complex problems. With 10 years’ experience in the IT industry, Michael started professional life as a developer but moved into consultancy when performance issues started to become the norm and not the exception. Previously, he worked for the NCC Group (formerly Site Confidence), helping customers from all industries improve the performance of their sites. Michael is constantly researching latest optimizations trends and current techniques and sits on the organizing committee of the London Web Performance Group. Michael has found himself becoming more and more impatient as he gets older, which fuels his desire for a faster web experience.

Patrick Hamann is a web performance engineer at Fastly, where, among other things, he is helping to build a faster web for all. Previously, he helped architect some of the world’s largest media websites, including the Guardian and the Financial Times. When not speaking or ranting about performance, he enjoys spending his time discovering new food and craft beer.

Meredith Hassett is a developer evangelist at SAP, where she shares her knowledge in frontend development, UI design, and the IoT. Meredith has worked on applications for financial institutions, nonprofits, and travel groups. She is a FIRST Robotics alumni and has worked on integrated technology solutions in designing novelty products. Meredith currently works out of San Francisco and spends her days finding new ways to blend her other passions with technology. Originally from the Philadelphia area, she holds a BS in computer engineering from the University of Virginia.

Val Head is design evangelist of UX innovation at Adobe, where she leads workshops at companies and conferences around the world to connect Adobe directly to the UX design community. A web animation expert and author, Val spent years as an independent UI animation consultant helping companies embrace UI animation as part of their design system and processes. She is the author of Designing Interface Animation by Rosenfeld Media, teaches CSS animation on Lynda.com, and curates the weekly UI Animation Newsletter.

Heidi Helfand is director of engineering excellence at Procore Technologies, creators of cloud-based construction software. She is author of Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams, which challenges the notion that you need to keep your teams the same in order to be successful and is based in part on Heidi’s experiences at two highly successful startups: ExpertCity, Inc. (acquired by Citrix), where she was on the original development team that invented GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, and GoToWebinar, and AppFolio, Inc., a SaaS property management software company that went public in 2015. 

Patrick Higgins is a UI engineer at Gremlin, where he helps developers unleash the power of controlled chaos. He is passionate about finding effective ways to make UIs resilient to failure. He fills his weekends with playing soccer, reading nonfiction, and assisting with civic causes that he cares about.

Pete Hodgson is an independent software delivery consultant who focuses on enabling software teams to deliver awesome software at a sustainable pace. He blurghs at blog.thepete.net and toots as @ph1.

Burke Holland is a Nashville-based developer advocate on the Azure team at Microsoft, where he works on behalf of JavaScript developers everywhere. A frontend developer, Burke enjoys JavaScript a lot because it’s the only way he Node to Express himself. Get it? Never mind. Burke blogs only slightly better than he codes and definitely not as good as he talks about himself in the third person.

Bradley Holt leads a team of developer advocates at IBM who are democratizing data and AI through open source technologies. His team’s work includes helping developers integrate open source deep learning models into their applications, ensuring trustworthiness and transparency from AI systems, promoting open standards for the deployment and operationalization of AI systems, and enabling better collaboration between developers, data scientists, and data engineers.

Brian Holt is a senior cloud developer advocate at Microsoft, where he’s all about developers, developers, developers. Previously, he was a JavaScript engineer at Netflix, LinkedIn, and Reddit. When not working, Brian finds time to teach on Frontend Masters, run his mouth on Front End Happy Hour, travel all over the world, and play with his adorable dog. Brian is a resident of San Francisco, CA.

Ben Hong is a senior UI developer at Politico. Ben spent his childhood building random websites like Fortune Cookie Universe on free hosting sites like Angelfire and Geocities. Unbeknownst to him, he would eventually make a career of it. Shortly after becoming an I/O psychologist, he managed to find his way back to his roots in development. When he’s not learning about some new technology, tinkering on side projects, or helping to co-organize meetups in the area, you can usually find him on some adventure somewhere exploring the seemingly endless things that life has to offer, whether it’s a new restaurant, board game, book, podcast, or {{insert something you’re passionate about here}}.

Cory House is an international speaker, Pluralsight author, Microsoft MVP, software architect, and principal consultant at Reactjsconsulting.com. He has trained over 10,000 software developers at conferences worldwide on clean coding, frontend development, testing, and software architecture and is author of multiple Pluralsight courses. He specializes in JavaScript and frontend development using React.

Bryan Hughes is a technical evangelist at Microsoft and longtime member of the Node.js and NodeBots communities. Bryan is the creator of Raspi IO, which provides Raspberry Pi support for the Johnny-Five JavaScript robotics library. Bryan also created Raver Lights, a distributed wireless wearable lighting system designed for festivals. Outside of tech, Bryan is an amateur photographer, occasional writer, a once-upon-a-time pianist, and a wine aficionado.

Gareth Hughes is a web performance enterprise architect at Akamai, where he advises customers on how to improve site performance at the frontend. Gareth has worked in web performance for more than six years and has a background in development, IT, and operations.

Ian James is a rapid prototype developer at FamilySearch, where he can usually be found comping screens, running user tests, or deep in complex JavaScript with one of his teammates. Previously, Ian worked for industry-leading game developers in a variety of startups. He’s passionate about the process of bringing thoughts to life. Time and time again, he finds his way to the middle of the action because that’s where he loves to be. After studying the visual fine arts for more than a decade as a youth, Ian received a degree in physics and illustration.

Nic Jansma is a software developer at Akamai building high-performance websites, apps, and open source tools.

Bobby is a full-stack developer, advocate, and evangelist at Auth0. He is a passionate engineer with an interest in learning and teaching new technologies, using open source software, and engaging the greater software development community. His experience ranges from building line-of-business applications for financial professionals with Russell Investments and Milliman to distributed social content apps with Cheezeburger and Steller.

Ivan Jovanovic is a senior software engineer at NearForm, as well as a team lead, speaker, and mentor. His focus is on building scalable JavaScript applications and experimenting with new languages and frameworks. He’s into functional and reactive programming. Leading teams and mentoring junior developers is his everyday duty. He loves to share knowledge and to write on his tech blog.

Tim Kadlec is a performance consultant and trainer focused on building a web everyone can use. He is the author of High Performance Images and Implementing Responsive Design: Building Sites for an Anywhere, Everywhere Web and was a contributing author for Smashing Book #4: New Perspectives on Web Design and the Web Performance Daybook: Volume 2. He writes about all things web at Timkadlec.com.

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Shubham Katiyar is a software development engineer at AWS, where he works on AWS Lambda@Edge, building a global compute platform for high-performance and personalized web services for the internet. Shubham is a fan of “four nines” and the challenge of zero-downtime web services operating at the scale of the internet.

Aimee Knight is a Nashville-based full stack software engineer at Built Technologies. Currently, she specializes in JavaScript, React, and CSS but has worked extensively in Angular, Node.js, and Ruby on Rails as well. As a former professional figure skater, she has a tremendous amount of energy and grit. Outside of work, Aimee is a Google Developer Expert in web technologies, a panelist on the JavaScript Jabber podcast, and an international keynote speaker. She has been a weekly panelist on the Angular Air podcast, a co-organizer for CharmCityJS, and a mentor for Baltimore NodeSchool and Rails Bridge.

Jen Kramer is a Lecturer at Harvard University Extension School in the Master’s of Liberal Arts in Digital Media Design program, where she teaches five courses per year, advises students, and assists in curriculum design. Jen is also a prolific video author and has created more than 30 training courses for Lynda.com, O’Reilly Media, osTraining, and Frontend Masters. She is also available for individual private tutoring, customized classroom training, and occasional freelance web design work. Jen holds a BS in biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MS in internet strategy management at the Marlboro College Graduate School.

Rachel Krause is a user experience specialist at Nielsen Norman Group, where she aims to show that UX is not just a specialty role on a team but a necessary one. She believes that collaboration is the key to a product’s success and that all roles on a team can influence the user experience. Rachel is an advocate for keeping the UX process lightweight and meaningful and for keeping focus on moving the team forward. She has worked with clients in many different mediums, from designing and developing to facilitating and coaching. Rachel is active in the UX community and is a frequent speaker and workshop facilitator at meetups and conferences on all things UX.

Keerthana Krishnan is a software engineer at Baker Hughes, a GE company. Keerthana is an international speaker at events like DebConf16 in Cape Town and FOSSASIA 2017 in Singapore. She participated in Google Summer of Code 2016 as an intern for Debian OS with the project Improving Voice Video and Chat in Free Software and attended the Grace Hopper Celebration India 2015 as a student scholar and the Open Source Summit 2017 in Japan. She’s also a volunteer for IEEE. Keerthana is a former student ambassador for the International Center for Free Open Source Software, part of the government of Kerala, India.

Matthew Larson is a software developer and UX designer at FamilySearch, where he works on a team tasked with exploring new and interesting ways to help people discover their family history. Previously, he worked in freelance web development and graphic design and founded and ran a small studio. Matthew started his college career in computer science. Well into his program, he felt something was missing. Four years later, he graduated with a BFA in industrial design. Ironically, most of his time since then has been spent developing software.

Annie Lau is manager of software engineering at Trulia, where she oversees the company’s registration and API team and is intimately involved with Trulia’s security team. She also heads up Trulia’s bug bounty program, a collaboration with recruited hackers from all over the world with a singular goal—identify security vulnerabilities. Previously, Annie was the director of product development at Quinstreet, a vertical marketing company, where she led the mobile platform team and was the gatekeeper for all the PHP and Node.js common code. Annie holds a degree in computer science from UC Berkeley. She resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two daughters. Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with her family, playing badminton, snowboarding, scuba diving, hiking, and biking.

Tracy Lee is cofounder of This Dot Labs, an elite consultancy helping teams build frontend applications. A Google Developer Expert, an RxJS Core Team member, a Women Techmakers lead, and a frequent keynote speaker at conferences, Tracy is also host of the Modern Web podcast and organizer of This.JavaScript, Contributor Days, Google Developer Group Silicon Valley and Triangle, and RxWorkshop.

Ally Long is a design lead at Field Intelligence. She’s worked on a broad array of projects, from public health software for NGOs and nonprofits to shiny brand experiences at agencies like Edenspiekermann and A Color Bright. She’d like to live in a place where sunscreen is a necessity but makes do in Berlin. Ally travels as much as humanly possible and spends a lot of her time working in West Africa.

Tara Manicsic is a developer advocate at Progress. A lifelong student, teacher, and maker, she has spent the majority of her career using JavaScript to create applications on both the backend and frontend. In her free time, she works in her community to educate and learn from other developers. Tara launched the Cincinnati chapter of Women Who Code and cochairs the Cincinnati branch of NodeSchool. Beyond code, she likes to make things with other materials (wool, solder, clay, etc.) and hike any mountain she can get to with her trusty sidekick, #toshmagosh.

Alexis Menard is a software engineer at Intel’s Open Source Technology Center in Portland, Oregon. His main focus is on the ever-evolving WebPlatform, which includes work on W3C standards as well as Blink/Chromium. In the latter projects, he serves as both developer and code reviewer. Alexis also worked on Crosswalk, an HTML5 runtime/webview for Android, where he did a bit of everything. Prior to Intel, Alexis worked on QtWebKit and WebKit at the Brazilian Nokia research center (INdT) and on the Qt framework as a part of Nokia (former Trolltech). He is also a former KDE contributor, contributing mostly to Plasma, the desktop shell of KDE.

Luca Mezzalira is the vice president of architecture at DAZN. In his 16-year career, Luca has worked on cutting-edge projects for mobile (iOS, Android, and Blackberry), desktop, web, TVs, set-top boxes, and embedded devices. Luca believes the best way to learn any programming language is by mastering its models, so he’s spent a lot of time studying topics like object-oriented programming, functional programming, and reactive programming. As a result, he’s able to swap easily between different programming languages, apply best practices, and drive any team to success. Luca is a Google Developer Expert on web technologies, the author of Front-End Reactive Architectures (Apress), and manager of the London JavaScript community.

H. Wade Minter is the chief technology officer at Custom Communications in Raleigh, NC. Previously, he was part of the founding team and CTO at TeamSnap and the engineering lead at WeaveUp and Adwerx. He is also the public address announcer for the National Hockey League’s Carolina Hurricanes and the ring announcer for GOUGE Professional Wrestling. He leads a weird life.

Aurelia Moser is a developer and curious cartographer building communities around code at Mozilla Open Science. Recent projects include mapping sensor data to support agricultural security and sustainable apis ecosystems in the Global South. She’s been working in the open tech and nonprofit science space for a few years, holding positions at Ushahidi, Internews Kenya, and CartoDB.

Rachel Myers is a backend engineer at Google working on Firebase rules. Previously, she was an engineer at GitHub and ModCloth and founded Opsolutely. In her free time, she designs enamel pins.

Emily Nakashima is a full stack JavaScript engineer who loves design, web perf, and metrics. Emily is a co-organizer of the AndConf code retreat and unconference and a volunteer for RailsBridge.

David Neal is a software developer at ReverentGeek. A husband, father, geek, musician, speaker, illustrator, software developer, and Microsoft MVP living in north Georgia, David runs on a high-octane mixture of caffeine and bacon.

Gergely Németh is an engineering manager at GoDaddy focused on Node.js and its ecosystem. A software engineer, architect, conference speaker, Gergely loves a good cup of coffee.

Addy is an engineering manager with the Chrome team at Google working on web performance. His day-to-day job is leading a speed team focused on trying to get pages on the web loading and running smoothly. Their projects include Lighthouse and Workbox. Addy is the author of Essential JavaScript Design Patterns and the recent Essential Image Optimization guide.

Maggie Pint is a software engineering lead in Azure’s Production Infrastructure Engineering (PIE) organization. Her team works on improving the engineering systems experience for Microsoft’s web developers. Maggie also coordinates open source and InnerSource education and incentive efforts in the Azure PIE organization. Outside of her day job, Maggie is a maintainer of the popular JavaScript library Moment.js and the JS Foundation’s delegate to TC39, JavaScript’s standards committee. She is passionate about dogs, coffee, the JavaScript language, and helping others live open source values in their day-to-day work. Maggie has extensive experience speaking at events like JSConf EU, CodeMash, Node Interactive, and many local conferences and meetups.

Eve Porcello is the cofounder of Moon Highway, a curriculum-development and training company based in Northern California, where she focuses on JavaScript, Node.js, React, and GraphQL. Eve has taught classes online for LinkedIn Learning and in person at companies all over the world. She’s the author of O’Reilly’s Learning React and Learning GraphQL.

Natalie Qabazard is a software engineer at Zillow Group, where she works with various web development technologies and APIs. Natalie is working on a new team, where she uses AWS products and APIs to bring a new product to millions of users at Trulia. Her experience working with React at Trulia has led her to training others and participating in panel discussions regarding the technology, as well as giving talks about React and AWS. Natalie is passionate about bridging the gap between academia and industry as well as fostering diversity in the computer science space; she is an active leader of the Women in Engineering group at Trulia and strives to facilitate constructive meetings for women engineers to attend monthly. Natalie holds a degree in computer science from the University of California, Davis.

Peggy Rayzis is an open source engineer on the Apollo team at Meteor Development Group, where she helps build tools for the GraphQL ecosystem. She’s also the author of react-native-create-bridge, host of Apollo #MissionBriefing, and an accomplished speaker and blogger. When she’s not coding, you can find Peggy hitting the ski slopes or traveling around the world.

Sam Richard—better known as Snugug throughout the internet—is a UI architect at IBM. A developer with design tendencies and a love of building open source tools to help with both, he is the author of North, a chair of SassConf, and an accomplished bacon connoisseur.

Brian Rinaldi is a developer advocate at Progress. Brian has been a developer for nearly 20 years, working with frontend and backend technologies mostly focused on the web. Brian is the coeditor of Mobile Web Weekly, authored a report on static site generators for O’Reilly, and coauthored Working with Static Sites, also from O’Reilly.

Laurel Ruma is a content director at O’Reilly Media. Laurel has chaired a number of O’Reilly conferences and workshops, including Next:Economy, Cultivate, Where 2.0, OSCON Java, and Gov 2.0 Expo.

Destry Saul is the genesis (first blockchain) engineer for Unchained Capital, a startup focused on financial products for cryptocurrency holders. His previous work includes big data application design and deployment and customer experience data science. Destry holds a PhD in astrophysics. His research focused on cold hydrogen gas outside our galaxy.

Princiya Sequeira is a software engineer at Zalando.

Dan Shappir (He/Him) is the Performance Tech Lead at Wix.com, focusing on making more than 100 million sites hosted on the Wix platform load and execute faster. Dan has over 25 years of software development experience and has worked on systems ranging from networked multiuser games, to missile trajectory simulations, to designing and building large-scale Web apps. He is a frequent speaker at technical conferences, and a panelist on the JavaScript Jabber podcast. Dan holds an MSc in Computer Science.

Kyle Shevlin is a senior software engineer at Formidable Labs. Kyle loves JavaScript. He is a fan of React and functional programming, isn’t a fan of semicolons, and is a maintainer of a glorious beard.

CJ Silverio is the CTO of npm. Her work allows JavaScript developers all over the world to share code and build modern web applications.

Kyle Simpson is an evangelist of the Open Web, passionate about all things JavaScript. He writes, speaks, teaches, and contributes to OSS.

Brian Sletten is the president of Bosatsu Consulting, where he focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the semantic web, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting, and other technologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A liberal arts–educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies, Brian has worked in many industries, including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality, and healthcare. He holds a BS in computer science from the College of William and Mary. Brian is a rabid reader and devoted foodie with excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his international pop recording career.

For more than 20 years, Nicolas Steenhout has been addressing inclusivity head-on as a web accessibility expert. As a developer in the mid-’90s, Nic was approached by colleagues, clients, and friends with web-based issues that weren’t yet part of the public consciousness: Images weren’t being properly announced to people who are blind; video-only tutorials didn’t account for people who are deaf; overengineered web pages made it impossible for those with ADHD to engage. Nic quickly realized that amid a major technological revolution, a significant part of the digital landscape was being neglected. In 1996, he took on a federally funded position in the US disability sector. The world of nonprofits allowed him to work closely with people with a wide variety of impairments and gave him an even greater understanding of the web’s shortcomings. At the same time, the experience introduced him to new assistive technologies—technologies that were breaking barriers for people with disabilities. Over the next two decades, Nic has continued his work for both the nonprofit and private sectors. He has held several executive positions and currently provides his services as an independent consultant to businesses and government agencies that seek Nic’s expertise in strategic planning and training. All over North America, Europe, and Australasia, he’s engaged with thousands of individuals with disabilities. These interactions have fueled his passion for storytelling. A public speaker, avid blogger, and podcaster, Nic provides real-world insight into everyday accessibility issues and explores everything from disability awareness and security to how JavaScript can be used to better the web for all. He’ll even share the occasional anecdote about his service dog.

Michael Swieton is a software developer at Atomic Object. For more than decade Michael has written, tweaked, bent, and broken code into the shape of software of all sorts for many industries. He obsesses over details, lines, and patterns and enjoys peeking under the hood of everything, be it math, or software, or coffee, or cake. He travels regularly and seeks out adventures ranging from theatre and culture to altitude sickness. He’s a frequent speaker at conferences and meetups, including RailsConf, Windy City Rails, SyntaxCon, BeerCityCode, and GLSEC.

Katie Sylor-Miller is a staff software engineer on the frontend systems team at Etsy, where she advocates for and implements frontend best practices in collaboration with product engineers and designers. She is passionate about frontend architecture, design systems, style guides, accessibility, performance, and teaching others. Katie has written about the engineering side of design systems for the Design Systems Handbook, and she created OhShitGit.com to share her hard-won knowledge of how to get out of your Git messes with a bit of humor (and a lot of swears).

Charlie Vazac is a principal software engineer at Akamai and cofounder of SOASTA. He’s written a charting package in VML (gasp!), Web 2.0 apps before we said “Ajax” and “Comet,” single-page applications before they were called SPAs, browser analytics code in vanilla JavaScript that “works” in IE5.5, SPAs transpiled from ES2017, and C++ for a popular web browser. Charlie loves figuring out how things work, why they sometimes don’t, and how to make them better.

Luis Vieira is a frontend architect a Farfetch.com, the number-one ecommerce website for luxury fashion.
Over his eight-year career in the frontend space, Luis has built a broad range of applications, from enterprise apps to large-scale consumer-facing websites.

Trent Willis is a senior UI engineer at Netflix, where he builds tools and applications to give others insight into their products. He’s also the project lead for the QUnit testing framework, a frequent contributor to various open source projects, and a self-professed music junkie.

Cherie Wong is the general manager for Amazon CloudFront at AWS, where she enables customers to run their websites and applications globally with the high performance, availability, security, and flexibility of compute at the edge. Cherie joined Amazon as an engineer back in 2005 and has led teams in the design of automated systems and the algorithms that optimize throughput for Amazon’s global fulfillment network. She started the robotics team to seek out Amazon’s next generation of automated systems to support its exponential growth. She has led startups within Amazon, such as MyHabit.com and BuyVIP.es/.it/.de, and spearheaded cross-organization initiatives in search to accelerate Amazon’s machine learning, algorithms, and user experience for fashion-oriented, contextual search. When she’s not trying to move bytes around the internet, Cherie has vast aspirations to be a model athlete, adventurer, and chef. Realistically, you’re more likely to find her sedentary on the couch, bourbon in hand.

Joseph Wynn is a full stack software engineer at SpeedCurve. Previously, he was a technical team lead at BBC News and built software for companies of all shapes and sizes. He contributes to open source projects like Preact, Jekyll, and Wraith.

Crystal Yan advises clients in the technology, healthcare, education, and nonprofit sectors as an independent consultant and is a product manager and designer with the United States Digital Service, a startup within the federal government using design and technology to deliver better government services to the American people. Crystal is a product and experience design leader focused on empowering organizations to be more customer centric and has worked in the US, India, China, and Cambodia. Previously, she led the user experience team at a civic tech startup transforming how organizations interact with governments worldwide. Crystal holds a degree in economics from Amherst College.

Mark Zeman is the founder of SpeedCurve, a frontend performance monitoring service that gives you continuous feedback on how your frontend code is affecting the performance of your website. Mark comes from a design background but has always been just as passionate about the code. He is based by the ocean in beautiful New Zealand and has spent 20 years crafting websites and mobile apps.